I wonder how much of this is a scam on the advertisers too, sure the platform might have great detail for targeting ads, but if someone comes along and outbids on generic terms it isn’t going to do you much good as an advertiser either.
Commercial wanted to stuff every page with as many ads and trackers as possible. We wanted to ensure the user didn’t have a miserable experience. As the company liked getting money, we, and the user, generally lost.
I kept an instance of Chrome blocker-free to see the site in all its ad-stuffed glory, but after learning a bit about how things work, I block all the things with extreme prejudice for personal browsing. And ensure friends & family do too.
Source: I setup Google Analytics event tracking to trigger on every page click.
Edit: change 10% to 5%. And it's actually only 2.5% over the past 14 days.
Edit2: and that was from ~200 clicks over 14 days.
Thank you, I now feel as good as I'll ever feel about using uBO.
I imagine you have some role in building the internet since you're on HN.
As far as I'm aware, by not blocking ads I am experiencing the internet that the majority of people also experience.
And I think that's how I can better understand the people I build things for.
Maybe if more tech workers took off their tin-foil ad-blocking hats then the ad industry, and the whole internet, would be better off.
Edit: I wonder how many developers that work for ad companies also use ad blockers. Probably a lot?
When a site is littered with ads, the content probably sucks, too.
Could the ads make the internet more usable? For example, they help evaluate the content before reading it and leading one to find better quality content sooner.
I used to simply switch to a CLI browser to google for things but these days its hit or miss as javascript is so heavily used.
Videos... auto run videos need to be abolished as well.
I do. I sit in a tiny corner where we just build websites without all that JS and tracking bullshit. (That's not to say that I never use JS, I just use it very sparingly.)
It's just a different philosophy. I don't need to know how many people exactly listen to my podcast. It's much more rewarding to me when I meet random people and they say "Oh you're that guy? I loved your last episode." That's 100 times more awesome than seeing a download counter increment.